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The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory

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The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory Journal of Modern Italian Studies ISSN: 1354-571X (Print) 1469-9583 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmis20 The Italian resistance between history and memory Paolo Pezzino To cite this article: Paolo Pezzino (2005) The Italian resistance between history and memory, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10:4, 396-412, DOI: 10.1080/13545710500314090 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13545710500314090 Published online: 20 Aug 2006. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1638 Citing articles: 11 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmis20 Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10(4) 2005: 396 – 412 ARTICLES The Italian Resistance between history and memory Paolo Pezzino Universita` di Pisa Abstract Since the 1960s the Resistance has held pride of place in public ceremonial, political debate and to a point also in historcial writing in Italy. The emphasis on its popular and national character transformed the Resistance into the struggle of the whole country to rid Italy of the German invaders and the small number of Italian fascists who remained their allies, but in ways that took no account of the complexity of people’s reactions and the different ways in which Italians experienced the years immediately after the fall of fascism. In the last decade, however, numerous accounts have been published that contradict the images of the Resistance that for 30 years have constituted the ‘official’ memory of the Italian Republic. As a result, the Resistance offers a classic example of the ‘public use of history’, in which historical interpretation has served primarily to justify party political, instutitional and idelogical ends. It is now clear, however, that the supposed unity against fascism was more the result of agreement that there were limits beyond which political differences could not be pressed rather than of a deeper political unity that might have provided the basis for the political and institutional reform of the Italian Republic. The contrasting memories and interpretations of that period that have recently re-emerged for the same reason make it more difficult to project a new Italian democracy for the future. Keywords World War II, resistance, memory, public history, fascism, Nazi Germany. Ever since the appearance of Claudio Pavone’s celebrated study, a milestone in a long process of historiographical revision (Pavone 1991),1 the Italian Resistance has become widely thought of as a civil war as well as a war of liberation.2 This has reopened, as it were, the memory of those years; has brought recognition by ‘the Left’ of the need to give space to the stories and motivations of the losers, those who chose to fight on the side of the fascists and Nazis, without of course suggesting that one side is simply the mirror image of the other. Research on other types of memory has become possible, including on varieties of the hitherto unmentionable: not all the stories and memories of the war of liberation/civil war/class war (the three categories Pavone uses in defining the Italian Resistance) converged and found a space in that hegemonic narrative which, from a certain point onwards, dwelt exclusively on the Resistance as a popular epic and founding moment for a ‘new’ national identity. Journal of Modern Italian Studies ISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online ª 2005 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13545710500314090 The Italian Resistance Since the 1960s, public commemorations, political exchange and, up to a point, historiographical debate had highlighted the popular, national character of the Resistance, which was portrayed as the struggle of an entire population to liberate the country from the German invader and its few Fascist allies, leaving in the shadows many of the complexities of behaviour and social dynamics that characterized the lived experience of Italians during those years. Moreover, battles over the memory of the Resistance were always thought of as involving the national community as a whole (Pavone 1992), and it seems clear that historical interpretation was often if not completely subordinate to, at least knowingly functional to, the ongoing political struggle at any given time. The Resistance thus represented a classic example of the ‘public use of history’, in which a historiographical discourse is construed to further the purposes of other orders of discourse (institutional, ideological, or party political) (Baldissara 2002). The result of the new trends is the emergence of a series of substantial historical contributions that cannot be fitted in to that public representation of the Resistance that sustained the ‘official’ memory of the Republic for 30 years or so. The memory that was cancelled was that of a ‘litigious past, considered inconvenient because it could still give rise to conflict’ (Loraux 1990: 27 – 9, 52 – 3). This too litigious and controversial past gave rise to a widespread tendency to create strategies of oblivion. Rather than admit that the conflict involved members of the same community, once the civil war was over the adversary was denied the status of an enemy, and was degraded to the level of traitor and lackey of the foreigner. In a civil war the defeated are often denied the right to memory, and are excluded from the ‘public’ view of the past that from then on upholds the rites of communal existence. Faced with a crisis such as that which Italy as a nation experienced from 8 September 1943 to 2 June 1946, the tendency was to hide the fractures of recent history. As in the Athens studied by Nicole Loraux, in postwar Italy ‘multiple, non-communicating, and potentially conflicting’ memories were made to merge by the dominant political authorities into a ‘public memory’, so as to lay foundation of a new collective identity, and of course ‘public memory [is] always a dominant memory, the memory of the winners’ (Cenci 1999: 337). In this construction of memory, oblivion, or the manipulation of events in order to construct an image that caters to necessity, becomes as essential as the transmission of events. The role the Resistance played in determining the identity of the Italian Republic is (still) much debated. The space that the Resistance could (and knew how to) occupy was remarkable in comparison to the complexity and strength of the forces that faced each other on the world’s political and military stage. It is antihistorical and ungenerous to blame the Resistance for not having liberated Italy on its own (this same observation could be made of all European resistance movements, and of each nation that was compelled to join a world alliance in order to oppose Nazism). Besides, if the Allies, with all their mistrust 397 The never-ending liberation and worries about the rise of the communists, continued to supply the partisans, it is because they were well aware of the contribution they were making to the military effort. The Germans, for their part, showed a comparable concern with their draconian orders against the partisans and their large-scale roundup operations.3 In order to avoid any limits on their freedom to pronounce on Italy’s political destiny, the Allies, and above all the British, undoubtedly attempted to limit the role of the armed resistance to the support of the Allied advance and sabotage. These tasks were certainly not without significance, but they were far from enough to encourage the development of a true national liberation army.4 Even if the partisans’ contribution to the war against the Germans was carried out within the limits imposed by the Allies, on the political front, antifascism and the Resistance succeeded to some degree in evading those limits. Much memoir writing and historiography, above all of the Left (albeit not all, although this is often forgotten), mistook the radical hopes for socio-political renewal of a part of the Resistance for the real possibilities that the situation offered. The myth of a Resistance betrayed was born that, like all myths, disregards historical reality.5 On the whole though, a realistic calculation of the balance of power between the Resistance and the Allies effectively braked the revolutionary tendencies of some elements and brought complete political success in the struggle against Fascism, favouring the legitimization of a new group of leaders braced to take control at the end of the war. Yet from a historical point of view, the limits of antifascism’s achievements are clear, whether in forging new institutions of the state (too much ambiguity and compromise, too much continuity with the old order – see Pavone (1995: 70 – 159; 1982: 160 – 84)), or building a new national political consciousness. The organizational and political evolution of the Resistance itself made such an outcome almost inevitable, because this was a war fought by ‘bands’ rather than by a national liberation army. One of the finest autobiographical novels about the experience puts it well: ‘you can have war by bands, but peace by bands, never’ (Meneghello 1976). In other words it was inevitable that the ethical and political inspiration of the partisans would be taken over, mediated and often diluted by those parties that had represented only one element of the situation while the network of bands was operating, but that ‘naturally’ became the Allies’ principal points of reference after the liberation. Oblivion too fell over the serious internal conflicts concerning military strategy and the ultimate political ends of the effort that had lacerated the Resistance movement while it was going on.6 These conflicts collided head on with the national question in the regions along the north-eastern border and exacerbated the contradictions of the alliance between the Communist Party and other antifascist forces that were present to some degree everywhere.
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